Iomega's 48x drive could never be called pretty -- but it is fast. Read our Australian review of this hefty external burner.

Iomega's 48x24x48 USB 2.0 External CD-RW Drive represents something of a change of pace for the storage company. It's had considerable success with its heavily styled Predator line of external drives, but the 48x burner here shares none of the visual flair of the Predator. Looks, as our parents used to tell us, aren't everything, and the drive certainly manages to impress with speedy and reliable burning results. The drive clearly belongs to the adage that hardware is something you can drop on your foot. If you did drop this drive on your foot, the drive would survive. We're not so sure about your foot, though.

The drive itself is a black affair that would suit best the style of dark case that Dell and IBM sell. Any user with a plain beige box will be stuck with a solid wedge of black somewhere on their desk. The physical build of the drive matches its design, although it's essentially idiot-proof--as long as your idiot of choice can understand a power and USB plug. The best thing about having a drive this bulky is that it should be quite shockproof.

As an external USB 2.0 drive, the setup procedure for the Iomega 48x24x48 USB 2.0 External CD-RW Drive is quite painless. Installation of Iomega's HotBurn Pro software requires a single reboot, at which point you can plug in the power to the drive. Find a free USB 2.0 port, plug it in and you're essentially ready to go on Windows (98 or greater) or Mac (OS 8.6 or greater) machines. Like most USB 2.0 devices, USB 1.1 is supported, but you'll be throttling back the speed to an extreme extent. With USB 1.1 plugging, the drive becomes a paltry 4x4x6 burner.

While the hardware treads a pedestrian line in visual terms, the software is arguably the drive's real Achilles heel, unless you're only going to want to do some very simple copying. Hotburn Pro (simply Hotburn if you're a Mac user) has one of the simplest interfaces we've ever seen on a burning application, and a lack of advanced burning modes. This isn't the software for you if you want to burn video CDs or create discs using older compatibility formats. Oddly enough, Iomega notes that the supplied Hotburn software for Mac users only works at USB 1.1 speeds, although this was something we were unable to test; presumably you'd want to jump ship to a different compatible package as soon as possible.

Like most drives, Iomega's opted to quote the maximum speed that the drive is capable of. That's a speed you can generally reach on only one part of the disc; in our tests, with Nero CD Speed, we managed an average speed of 37x burning with the drive across the entire surface of the disc. Performing the same tests with digital audio extraction in mind revealed a DAE speed of just over 30x.

That translated into quite speedy burning times, although the supplied Hotburn Pro software is something of a slug; often initiating a burn would see the package simply pause for up to 30 seconds while it worked out what to do next. The product fared best at CD ripping and burning, taking 1:30 to extract audio from a 33 minute CD and a further 1:53 to then burn a copy of said disc. Burning 700MB of data to a disc took an average of 3:36, which should be fast enough for most users.

With the advent of cheap DVD burners, the pressure is really on the CD-RW market, even in the normally more expensive external space. At AU$499, the Iomega 48x24x48 drive is reasonably priced, although we'd expect to see it drop in price relatively sharply; for not that much more you can get a lower-end DVD burner, albeit not in an external casing.

Iomega 48x24x48 USB 2.0 External CD-RW Drive
Company: Iomega Australia
Price: AU$499
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 02 8223 9140

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